How to Optimize Your Facebook Page Like Campaigns the Quick and Dirty Way

by Sofia Zab

Recently I've been running a Facebook advertising campaign with the goal of getting more 'likes' for the Driftrock page.)

This is not the sort of campaign I wanted to be spending a lot of time setting up, yet I ran into a familiar dilemma: Knowing the best practice vs being able to take the time to apply it (a common concern of Facebook marketers I speak to).

My goals for the campaign are:

While I want the likes I get to be as cheap as possible overall, I also wanted to get a good distribution between cheap likes in emerging markets and expensive likes in developed economies. After all, though it looks good to have thousands of likes on your Facebook page, it can really drag a brand down when everybody can see your Facebook likes don't match up to the kind of markets your company claims to target!

I also want to use these Facebook page like ads as an opportunity to discover new markets that we could be exploring for Driftrock.

And ideally, some of those fans would end up converting on our website.

Previously, the only way to optimise a campaign on the go to achieve these goals was to set up a different "like" ad for each country that you are targeting - in my case more than 20! Multiply that by the number of age groups you want to target and again if you want to split by gender.

Here's what I did instead, with the help of our tool OpenBook (free for another few weeks, so best sign up now! ;)

I set up 3 Ad groups on Facebook for my campaign: Developed economies in Europe, developed economies elsewhere and emerging markets. All ads within these adgroups target both men and women aged 18-54, who also like Facebook pages relevant to social media advertisement such as AllFacebook.

After a couple of days, there is enough data to check out in the OpenBook targeting report (no excel necessary!).

In the age and gender tab we can see that, somewhat unsurprisingly, young people cost less money per like:

Encouragingly, although more men signed up than women, they both cost about the same to convert overall - I will keep targeting my ads at both genders:

I noticed over the last two days of my campaign that the ad group targeting 'emerging markets' has been getting some incredibly cheap likes. But where are they coming from?

Time to take the Philippines out of my targeting options! I also noticed some new sign-ups to Driftrock from Dubai and Israel, countries that we don't target elsewhere - maybe it's time to try some conventional ads with them.

And this is how you get super-useful insights that can help you optimise your campaigns in 30 seconds!

You can use OpenBook for more than just page like ads of course. Currently supported ad types include:
- Page post ads
- Right bar ads
- Page like ads
- Mobile app installs

Open Book has just opened up its beta. The tool will be free to use for another few weeks for all user tiers. Sign up here for free!

I'd love to learn how page like ads fit into your company strategy. Do you see them as a branding exercise, or have they also led to valuable conversions?